joy and sorrow are inseparable. . . together they come and when one sits alone with you . . remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.

This line comes from Kahlil Gibran’s prose-poem sequence The Prophet (1923), in the chapter “On Joy and Sorrow.” In the book, Almustafa—about to depart the city of Orphalese after years of living among its people—answers a series of questions posed by townsfolk on enduring human themes (love, work, freedom, pain, joy). The meditation on joy and sorrow reflects Gibran’s characteristic blend of spiritual universalism and lyrical aphorism, written in English for an early 20th‑century audience and shaped by his experience as a Lebanese immigrant writer moving between Middle Eastern and American cultural worlds.

Gibran frames joy and sorrow not as opposites to be separated but as paired experiences that deepen one another. The image of one “asleep upon your bed” when the other “sits alone with you” suggests emotional states are cyclical and interdependent: sorrow carries the seed of future joy, and joy is shadowed by the knowledge of loss. The counsel is not to deny grief or cling to happiness, but to recognize both as part of a single human capacity for feeling. In this view, a “deeper” life—one that can hold sorrow—also enlarges the possibility of joy.